US to research on Covid-19 impact on children

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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a new research effort to understand how COVID-19 affects children, who have accounted for roughly 13 percent of total confirmed cases in the country.</p>
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The research will investigate why some children are at greater risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection than others, why symptoms vary among children who are infected, and how to identify children at risk for severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection, according to a release of the NIH on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.</p>
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Research will also focus on multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a life-threatening condition marked by severe inflammation of one or more parts of the body, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes and gastrointestinal organs.</p>
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Based on current data, most children with SARS-CoV-2 infection do not develop serious illness. However, those who do go on to develop MIS-C can experience prolonged fever and severe abdominal pain and may progress to shock, according to the NIH.</p>
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About 3.17 million children in the United States have tested positive for Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic, according to a latest report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association.</p>
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A total of 3,168,274 child Covid-19 cases had been reported across the country as of February 25, and children represented 13.1 per cent of all confirmed cases, according to the report.</p>
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The overall rate was 4,209 cases per 100,000 children in the population.</p>
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Over 64,000 new child Covid-19 cases were reported last week. This marked the sixth consecutive week with a decline in new cases, according to the AAP.</p>
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Over the two weeks from February 11 to 25, there were 134,904 new child Covid-19 cases reported across the country, an 4 per cent increase.</p>
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Children accounted for 1.3 per cent to 3 per cent of total reported hospitalizations, and 0 to 0.19 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths, said the report.</p>
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"At this time, it appears that severe illness due to Covid-19 is rare among children. However, there is an urgent need to collect more data on longer-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including ways the virus may harm the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as its emotional and mental health effects," the AAP said in the report.</p>
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The United States has recorded over 28.67 million cases with more than 515,300 related deaths as of Tuesday noon, according to the real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.</p>
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<em>(IANS)</em></p>